Rough Treatment

by John Harvey

  Thirteen

  Grabianski’s first thought was that the woman on the bed looked strangely familiar; his second told him it was Maria. The third, panic rising till he could taste it like bile at the back of his mouth, was that there had been a camera hidden in the Roys’ bedroom.

  “Will you look at this?” Grice was sprawled across an easy chair, a large pack of salted peanuts, honeyed popcorn, a can of Diet Pepsi all within easy reach. “I’ve seen hotter things at the bottom of the freezer.”

  “Where did you …?”

  “Hey, come on now …”

  “What the fuck …?”

  “Grabianski, take it easy!”

  On his feet, Gnice watched as his partner’s fingers fumbled for the proper control, found it at the third or fourth attempt and all three out-of-focus figures flicked from sight.

  Grabianski stared at him, legs braced before the silenced television, the VCR. It wasn’t often Grice thought about the twenty pounds or so by which Grabianski outweighed him, the extra fitness, the speed: wasn’t often he’d felt the need.

  “Look …” Grice began.

  “No!”

  “Look …”

  “No. That’s you. Looking. You’re the looker here. You’re the fucking, what d’you call it?—yes—you’re the voyeur. No wonder this place already smells the way it does. Sitting around all day stuffing yourself with that junk, jerking off over …”

  Grabianski came close: came close to catching Grice by the shoulders, hurling him back across the partly furnished room. Grice knew it. Knew, also, when the moment had passed, anger falling back across his partner’s eyes.

  “Where did you get this anyway?”

  “The set? I went out and hired it. Rent them both together, it’s as cheap as pissing.”

  “The video—the tape.”

  “You know where we got that.”

  Grabianski’s hands fell away to his sides. “Shit!” He turned away and walked towards the window, hesitated, moved towards the door.

  “Jerry,” Grice said, following after him, “let me get you a drink. Here, look, while you were busy I did a little stocking up.”

  In the middle of the kitchen floor a cardboard box held half a dozen bottles of spirits, two four-packs of beer. Tins of soup and sardines, two loaves of wrapped, sliced bread stood on the work surface, close by the gas hob.

  Grice bent towards the box. “Scotch? Vodka? I got vodka, two kinds. I can never remember which it is you like best.”

  “Forget it.”

  “I just bought it.”

  “Forget it.”

  “Okay.”

  Grice shrugged his shoulders, gave a little shake of the head. He had brought through his Diet Pepsi with him and now he poured what was left into a glass and added a finger of scotch.

  “It’s the tape from the safe, right?” Grabianski said.

  “Right”

  “Jesus!”

  “If it’s any consolation, she didn’t look as if she was having a lot of fun.” In fact, Grice thought, she looked as though she had the hump. He kept the thought to himself; right then, he didn’t think Grabianski would appreciate the joke.

  “Anyway, Jerry,” Grice said after a couple of moments, “how was it? How’d it go?”

  Grabianski stared back at him stonily.

  “No, I mean when you made her the proposition, how did it go down?”

  “Lloyd Fossey, sir.” Millington had met Resnick in the small, sloping car park and was walking close alongside him, into the station. “Last time I saw him, he was living in the middle of a terraced street out in Sutton, stone-cladding on the front wall and a van parked out front with his own name misspelt on the side panel. Now he’s got a detached house out towards Burton Joyce and, according to the bloke across the road, he’s driving an F-reg. Audi.”

  “Come on in the world,” said Resnick, starting up the stairs.

  “Moved into this place nine months back, not far short of three hundred thousand.”

  I wish someone would offer that for mine, thought Resnick. Half of that. Anything.

  “No matter if he’s mortgaged up the wazoo,” Millington pushed open the door to the CID office and stood aside to let Resnick pass through, “he’s got to have found a lot of cash from somewhere.”

  “And you don’t think he acquired it servicing security systems?”

  “Electronic surveillance consultant, that’s what Fossey introduced himself as when he moved in. Looks as though he’s using his own place for demonstrations. Lift a crocus out of the flower bed and you’ll be up to your ears in alarm bells.”

  “Crocus?” said Resnick.

  “Unnatural this year, sir, the weather. False spring.”

  Right, thought Resnick, I’ve known a few of those too. At the back of the room, Patel had paused in typing up a report and was trying to catch his eye. Divine, chair tilted back on its rear legs, was listening with the telephone to his ear, a bored expression on his face.

  “And Fossey?” Resnick asked.

  “Honeymoon, sir. Expected back the day after tomorrow.”

  “Canary Islands?” suggested Resnick. “Turkey?”

  Millington shook his head. “Benidorm.”

  “At least it’s not Skegness.”

  “Close your eyes, sir, difficult to tell the difference. So they say.”

  Resnick knew that Millington drove his wife and kids each summer to Devon, each autumn a week with his wife’s parents somewhere north of Aberdeen. The Christmas she had gone off on a three-city tour of Russia, Millington had stayed home and dressed the tree.

  “Sir,” said Patel.

  “A minute,” said Resnick, holding up a hand, fingers spread wide.

  “I got in touch with a few security firms,” Millington continued, “to see if anyone knew what Fossey was into. Sounds as if what he does is chat people up, goes round their homes makes a lot of fuss about the need for a personalized system and more often than not brings in someone else to fit it up.”

  “Taking his fee off the top.”

  “Naturally.”

  “Nice work if you can get it. And if the systems you’ve recommended don’t keep the bad boys out, more work is what you won’t get.”

  “Agreed,” said Millington. “But what about the places he gets a good look at and where he isn’t taken on as consultant afterwards?”

  “Can we check that out?”

  “Difficult until I can get hold of Fossey, find a way of looking through his records. Supposing he keeps them.”

  “Worth checking all the security firms, see what contact he’s had with them?”

  Millington nodded. “I’ll get someone on it, sir. It’s 137 to 143 in Yellow Pages. Maybe Naylor when he’s through collating the stuff from the insurance companies.”

  “And you’ll arrange to meet Fossey on his return?”

  “Flight BA435. I’ll make sure he’s welcomed back.” Millington turned away. Patel was still hovering; Resnick pointed towards Divine, still half-listening to an interminable call. “Rees Stanley?”

  “Right pissed off, sir. No snow. Came back two days early, like we said.”

  Resnick acknowledged the information, beckoned Patel.

  “I ran into the PC who went out to the Roy house, sir, the one who took Maria Roy’s statement.”

  “Ran into him?”

  “I made it seem that way, sir. I thought it was best.”

  “And?”

  “He thought there was something not quite right at the time. Tried to tell Inspector Harrison, but the inspector wasn’t interested. Told him to write up Mrs. Roy’s statement and forget about it.”

  Grabianski had ejected the Roys’ holiday movie and removed it from Grice’s sight. Not that Grice would have bothered watching it a second time: all those goose pimples, all that sagging flesh was enough to give him the heaves. It was common knowledge that where sexual attraction was concerned, one man’s meat was another man’s poison, but what Grice had s
een was enough to turn him vegetarian.

  Grabianski, who had left that morning like the original good-humor man, was as sullen as a lovesick calf. Sapped. So much for the exchange of bodily fluids. He’d always known that Samson getting his hair cut was a symbol for something else.

  “What did she think of the idea? I mean, d’you think she went for it?”

  Grabianski really was in a bad way. He hadn’t as much as opened a bird book in hours.

  “You pointed out to her the disadvantages of not paying up?”

  “Yes,” said Grabianski without conviction.

  “You had to be doing something all that time apart from … All right, okay, no offense. No need to get on a spike about it. I just need to be certain.”

  “So be certain. I laid it out.” (Grice suppressed a snigger.) “As we planned. Street value of a kilo of cocaine is 24,000 and rising. Back in their hands for twenty, no questions either way.”

  “What did she say?”

  “I told you.”

  “Tell me again.”

  “They’ve got as much chance of raising 20,000 in forty-eight hours as England has of winning the next World Cup.”

  “She’s a soccer fan?”

  “All right, she didn’t say that, not exactly. It was what she meant.”

  “Stick to what she said.”

  “What she said was, I could sit here till hell freezes over before we could come up with that much money.”

  “And what was your response to that? Aside from crossing yourself.”

  “I didn’t cross myself.”

  “Get to the point.”

  “She reckons her husband is stupid for agreeing to hold the stuff in the first place. She says, right now he’s scared out of his wits, looking over his shoulder all the time, terrified the guy’s going to think he’s been double-crossed and come after him. Her Harold’s frightened this dealer’s going to cut his face, break both his legs, you name it, kill him.”

  “How’s she feel about this?”

  “Maria? She thinks it’s terrific. Especially the latter.”

  “She wants her old man killed?”

  “Slowly for preference, but she’d settle for a bullet in the back of the head.”

  “Christ! What’s he done to her?”

  “Recently? Not a lot.”

  “Great! She wants him dead so’s you and her can waltz off into the sunset.”

  Grabianski got up from where he was sitting and picked up his binoculars, walked to the living-room windows.

  “Put those down and listen to me. It’s dark out there. All you can see are street lights and bathroom windows.” He touched Grabianski on the arm. “That’s it, isn’t it? An afternoon of shimi-sha-wobble and she’s packing a suitcase.” He pointed at Grabianski’s crotch. “What you got down there, anyway? A guided missile?”

  “It’s not what you’ve got …” Grabianski began.

  “I know,” finished Grice, “it’s what you do with it. Lectures on the joy of sex I can do without. Where I get most of mine, I just lay back and leave it all to massage lotion number nine. Like the masseuse, I’m more interested in the money.”

  “She’ll tell him, try and get him to go along. She promised me that.”

  “I’ll bet. Crossed her heart and hoped her beloved Harold would die.”

  “No, she’ll tell him straight.”

  “You think he’ll make an offer?”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  “I’d offer twelve, wait for you to come back seventeen and a half, hope against hope to settle for fifteen. Then start to worry about finding it.”

  “He can sell the car, talk to his bank manager, cash in an insurance policy, that’s what he can do,” Grabianski said. “I think he can find the fifteen.”

  “I hope so. Sitting here with a kilo of cocaine isn’t good for my nerves.”

  “You don’t have any.”

  “Correction: didn’t.”

  “Don’t worry. He’s half as scared as she says he is, he’ll pay up.”

  Grice’s stomach made a low rumbling sound, like a bowling ball being rolled slowly along wooden boards.

  Grabianski glanced over at the soup and sardines. “We going out to eat?”

  “Later.”

  “What’s wrong with now?”

  “You’re not the only one with things to do.”

  “Where this time? Studio Heaven or the Restless Palms?”

  “I’ve got to see a man about some property.”

  “Renting or buying?”

  “Burgling.”

  “Want me to come along?”

  “Suit yourself.”

  “I’ll leave it to you. Take a bath.”

  “Okay. Why don’t you meet me in the Albany bar? We can have a couple of drinks, go up to the Carvery.”

  “The drinks are fine. Let’s eat somewhere else.”

  Grice shrugged: okay.

  “What I really fancy,” said Grabianski, “is a good Chinese.”

  Fourteen

  There were two tramps who roamed the city, both of them big, belligerent men whose clothing flapped away in shreds and patches. When they cursed, most people looked the other way and laughed or tutted. Scarce a day he was on duty, Resnick didn’t pass either of them, both: so visible it was easy to think they were the only ones. Never mind the centers for the homeless, the hostels, bed-and-breakfast families in the disinfected smell of small hotels, the squats; the city council’s plans to build no council houses in the coming year. He tried to remember when he had first been stopped by a young man, hand out-thrust, begging—343 jobs in today’s paper, the placards had read. Why don’t you clean yourself up a bit, Resnick had thought, get yourself one of those? “Spare change,” the man had said. “Cup of tea.” Resnick had made the mistake of looking at his face, the eyes; he doubted if he had been eighteen. “Here.” A pound coin, small, into the cold of the young man’s palm. Now there were more of them, more each day. And still 343 jobs in the paper: audiotypists, VDU skills, computer operators, clerical assistants, lockstitch machinists (part-time).

  He indicated, slowed, locked the car and left it at the curb. How many security firms had Millington said there were? Enough to fill half a dozen yellow pages. A lot of people with a lot to lock away, defend. Every Englishman’s right. Put it in bricks and mortar, wasn’t that the saying? Every Englishman’s home his castle. Lloyd Fossey with his electronic moats and drawbridges, television scanners, remote-control.

  Safe as houses: another saying.

  He turned the key in the lock and as he did so his breath caught and held. Someone was already inside the house.

  Resnick stepped into the hall, soft; eased the door back against the jamb, not closed; the keys he slipped into his side pocket. Listening, he wondered what had alerted him, wondered if he had been wrong, imagination conjuring games for him to play. No. Water dripping on to plastic, the bowl in the kitchen sink, the washer he was always meaning to renew. Not that. Where were the cats who should have padded out to greet him, pushing their heads against his feet?

  They were in the kitchen, four of them, heads dipped towards their bowls, feeding. What else would have kept them so occupied? Claire Millinder was wearing a different sweater, blue-gray with puffy white sheep grazing across it, the same short skirt over today’s mauve tights, same red boots. She stood watching the cats, can-opener in her hand.

  “Hallo.”

  The opener flew from her fingers as she turned, one bowl was kicked against another, milk spilt; Pepper jumped inside the nearest saucepan, Miles hissed and sprang on to the tiles beside the oven, Bud cowered in a corner while Dizzy, undeterred, finished his own portion and started on another.

  “I didn’t hear you come in.”

  “That was the idea.”

  Claire stared at him, waiting for her breathing to steady back to normal. Give me his measurements and several hundred pounds, she thought, there’s a lot I could do for the way he looks.

 
“You thought I was a burglar,” she said.

  “I thought you were my wife.”

  Resnick coaxed Pepper out of hiding, nuzzled the scrawny Bud behind the ears, the animal’s heart still pumping against its delicate ribs; he dropped handfuls of beans into the coffee-grinder, shiny and dark.

  “You’re at home here, aren’t you?”

  “This house?”

  “The kitchen.”

  Resnick took two-thirds of a rye loaf from inside a plastic bag, margarine from the refrigerator. “How about a sandwich?”

  “Most men I’ve come across, even the ones who are good at it, good cooks, they never seem really comfortable with what they’re doing. Like it’s some kind of challenge. All those ingredients lined up in order to use; lists of times stuck over the cooker like something from an organization-and-methods seminar.” Claire shook her head dismissively. “It’s not natural.”

  “A sandwich?”

  “Sure.”

  Sandwiches, in Claire Millinder’s experience, were neat slices of wholemeal bread pressed around cheese rectangles or turkey breast, augmentations of tasteless salad and a smear of low-calorie mayonnaise. For Resnick, they were more satisfying on every level: two major ingredients whose flavors were contrasting but complementary, sharp and soft, sweet and sour, a mustard or chutney to bind them, but with the taste all its own, finally a fruit, unforced tomato, thin slices of Cox or Granny Smith.

  “May I use your phone?”

  “Through there and on the left, help yourself.”

  She was finishing the call when Resnick came into the room, two mugs in one hand, plates balanced on the other.

  “God! When you said a sandwich, I wasn’t expecting …”

  “Here, can you take one of these?”

  “Okay, got it.”

  “You don’t have to eat it all, you know.”

  “No, that’s all right. It looks wonderful.” She eased back into the armchair. “Good job I just canceled my dinner date.”